Catherine Zeta Jones
Catherine Zeta-Jones, ( ; born 25 September 1969) is a Welsh actress. Born and raised in Swansea, Zeta-Jones aspired to a theatrical career from an early age. In her early teens, she played roles in the West End productions of the musicals Annie and Bugsy Malone. She studied musical theatre at the Arts Educational Schools, London, and made her adult stage breakthrough with a leading role in a 1987 production of 42nd Street. Her screen debut came in the French-Italian film 1001 Nights (1990), and she found success as a regular in the British television series The Darling Buds of May (1991–93). Tired of being typecast as the token pretty girl in British films, Zeta-Jones relocated to Los Angeles. Zeta-Jones established herself in Hollywood with roles in the action film The Mask of Zorro (1998) and the heist film Entrapment (1999). Critics praised her portrayal of a vengeful pregnant woman in Traffic (2000) and a murderous singer in the musical film Chicago (2002). The latter won her Academy and BAFTA Awards for Best Supporting Actress, among other accolades. She starred in high-profile films for much of the decade, including the black comedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003), the heist film Ocean's Twelve (2004), the comedy The Terminal (2004), and the romantic comedy No Reservations (2007). Parts in smaller-scale features were followed by a decrease in workload, during which she returned to the stage and portrayed an ageing actress in A Little Night Music (2009), winning a Tony Award. Zeta-Jones continued to work intermittently in the 2010s, starring in the psychological thriller Side Effects (2013) and the action film Red 2 (2013). Zeta-Jones has received an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award and a Tony Award, and in 2010 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her film and humanitarian endeavours. She supports various charities and causes, and is a prominent celebrity endorser of brands. Her struggle with depression and bipolar II disorder has been well-documented by the media. She is married to the actor Michael Douglas with whom she has two children. Early life and initial stage career , where Zeta-Jones lived as a teenager]] Zeta-Jones was born in Treboeth, Swansea, Wales, on 25 September 1969 to David Jones, the owner of a sweet factory, and his wife Patricia ( Fair), a seamstress. Her father is Welsh and her mother is of Irish Catholic descent. She was named after her grandmothers, Zeta Jones and Catherine Fair. She has an older brother, David, and a younger brother, Lyndon, who worked as a sales representative before venturing into film production. When she was 12, the family moved to the seaside village of Mumbles. She was educated at the Dumbarton House School, a private school in Swansea. The family came from a modest background, but they won £100,000 in a bingo competition, allowing them to pay for Zeta-Jones' dance and ballet lessons. Her mother sent Zeta-Jones to the Hazel Johnson School of Dance when she was five years old. She participated in school stage shows from a young age and gained local media attention when her rendition of a Shirley Bassey song won a Junior Star Trail talent competition. As part of a dance troupe, she routinely took trips to London, where she auditioned for roles in the theatre. At the age of nine she was selected to play one of the orphan girls in a West End production of the musical Annie, and at 11 she became a national tap-dancing champion. In 1981 she played the lead role of Annie in a production of the musical at the Swansea Grand Theatre. Two years later she played the lead role of Tallulah in a West End production of Bugsy Malone. When she was 15 Zeta-Jones dropped out of school without obtaining O-levels and moved to London to pursue a full-time acting career; she was engaged to perform in a touring production of The Pajama Game. Describing her teenage years in London, Zeta-Jones said, "I would queue up for auditions and then change my costume or put on a different leotard and audition again. It might take me two tries, but I always got the job. I figured out what they wanted". She went on to attend the independent Arts Educational Schools in Chiswick, London, for a three-year course in musical theatre. In 1987, when she was 17 years old, Zeta-Jones was picked as the second understudy to the lead actress in a West End production of 42nd Street. During one of the performances, both the star and the first understudy were unavailable, and Zeta-Jones was asked to play the role of Peggy Sawyer — a chorus girl who becomes a star. The producer was impressed by her acting ability and allowed her to play the role for the next two years. Her next stage appearance was with the English National Opera at the London Coliseum in 1989 where she played Mae Jones in Kurt Weill's Street Scene. Career 1990–1996: Screen debut and career struggles In 1990 Zeta-Jones made her film debut in the director Philippe de Broca's film 1001 Nights. An adaptation of the Persian fable One Thousand and One Nights, the French-Italian production recounts the tale from the perspective of Scheherazade (Zeta-Jones), one of the brides of King Sharir (Thierry Lhermitte). The film was not well received at the box office, and according to de Broca's obituary in The Daily Telegraph, the film "is best remembered for its enjoyable nude scenes". Greater success followed when she starred opposite David Jason and Pam Ferris in the British period comedy-drama television series The Darling Buds of May from 1991 to 1993. Adapted from H. E. Bates' novel of the same name, Zeta-Jones played the role of the eldest daughter of a family living in the countryside in 1950s Britain. The series was the highest-rated television show in the country at the time, and Zeta-Jones gained wide public recognition for it; she said "Literally, with one hour of television my life completely changed. I couldn't go anywhere". Following a brief appearance as Beatriz Enríquez de Arana in the unsuccessful adventure film Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992), Zeta-Jones featured as a belly dancer in disguise in a 1992 episode of George Lucas' television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. She next took on the part of a would-be duchess in Splitting Heirs (1993), a farcical period drama from the director Robert Young about two children (Eric Idle and Rick Moranis) who are separated at birth. Reviews for the film were negative, though Vincent Canby of The New York Times found her to be "very funny". In 1994 Zeta-Jones played the melancholic Eustacia Vye in the television film The Return of the Native, an adaptation of the novel of the same name (1878) by Thomas Hardy, and the wife of Lloyd Owen's character in the television war drama The Cinder Path. She was then cast as the eponymous protagonist of the 1995 television biopic Catherine the Great. Lisa Nesselson of Variety found the miniseries to be "brightly colored" but "wooden and hollow"; she thought that Zeta-Jones "imparts a certain grace and resolve to her sovereign-in-the-making". Zeta-Jones next starred as the pragmatic girlfriend of Sean Pertwee's character in Blue Juice (1995), publicised as Britain's first surf film, which Leonard Maltin described as a "superficial and predictable" production. Tired of being typecast as the token pretty girl in British films, Zeta-Jones moved to Los Angeles. She believed that the anonymity she faced in America helped her get roles on merit and not due to her public image. She earned the part of Sala, the henchwoman of the villainous Drax (Treat Williams) in the superhero film The Phantom (1996), starring Billy Zane in the titular role. A reviewer for Variety considered Zeta-Jones to be a standout in her part, but the film had a negative critical reception and earned little at the box office. The CBS television miniseries Titanic (1996) was better received. Starring opposite Peter Gallagher and George C. Scott, she portrayed the lead role of Isabella Paradine, a young mother engaged in an extramarital affair on the [[RMS Titanic|RMS Titanic]]. 1998–2000: Hollywood breakthrough and success '' at the 52nd Cannes Film Festival in 1999]] Steven Spielberg took notice of Zeta-Jones in Titanic and recommended her to Martin Campbell, who was directing The Mask of Zorro (1998) for Spielberg's production company. Campbell cast her as the leading lady in preference to Izabella Scorupco, who was his original choice for the part. Co-starring Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas, the film tells the story of Zorro (Hopkins), a Latin warrior who sets out to avenge the death of his wife and find his lost daughter Eléna (Zeta-Jones). She found similarities between her "volatile" Celtic personality and the temperament of the Latin warrior she played, and in preparation she studied dancing, riding and sword-fighting. Filming the action and dance sequences while wearing heavy corsets in the humid Mexican desert proved to be a challenge for Zeta-Jones, but she found the experience "worth suffering for". The Mask of Zorro was positively received by the critics and earned over US$250 million worldwide. Writing for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers commented that "Zeta-Jones needs no lessons in being gorgeous" and commended her for turning "the battle into a delicious game of strip-fencing". The role proved to be a breakthrough for her and she was nominated for the MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. Zeta-Jones' first release of 1999 was the heist film Entrapment, in which she starred opposite Sean Connery as a seductive insurance agent on the lookout for an art thief. Despite a negative critical reception, the film was a commercial success; Janet Maslin of The New York Times thought that the film provided Zeta-Jones a platform to "show off her slithery skills" and Andrew Anthony of The Observer praised a scene in which Zeta-Jones is "all feline grace, balletic skill and wanton sexuality", but showed concern that "her charms are not subtle and her range of expressions is narrow, but neither point need be a drawback in the kind of action films that are undoubtedly her metier". Later that year Zeta-Jones appeared alongside Liam Neeson and Lili Taylor in The Haunting, a remake of the 1963 film of the same name about a team of paranormal experts who look into strange occurrences in an ill-fated mansion. The horror feature received generally poor reviews but found a large worldwide audience. In a scathing review, Mick LaSalle wrote that "Zeta-Jones seems less an actress and more a pretty face, and not an interesting one at that". After taking the supporting part of star John Cusack's romantic interest in the comedy-drama High Fidelity (2000), Zeta-Jones starred in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000). In the ensemble thriller on drug abuse starring Michael Douglas and Benicio del Toro, she played Helena Ayala, the pregnant wife of a drug lord who takes over the business when her husband is arrested. Initially written by Soderbergh as a mother of two, he changed the part to that of a pregnant woman on Zeta-Jones' suggestion, to accommodate her own pregnancy. Highly profitable at the box office and critically acclaimed, Traffic was described by the Dallas Observer as "a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work". Edward Guthman of the San Francisco Chronicle found Zeta-Jones to be a standout among the ensemble and described her as "sensational" in a scene in which she confronts a Tijuana dealer, adding that "through sheer conviction, she electrifies a moment that could have been absurd". The ensemble of Traffic won the SAG Award for Outstanding Cast and Zeta-Jones was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. 2001–2004: Chicago and other roles The romantic comedy America's Sweethearts was Zeta-Jones' sole film project of 2001. She starred as a shrewd movie star, opposite Julia Roberts who featured as her character's under-confident sibling. The critic Roger Ebert compared the film unfavourably to the musical Singin' in the Rain (1952), but thought that Zeta-Jones was aptly "chilly and manipulative" in her part. The following year, Zeta-Jones starred alongside Renée Zellweger as the murderous nightclub singer Velma Kelly in Chicago (2002), a film adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name from the director Rob Marshall. She based her character's look and mannerisms on the actress Louise Brooks, and as the script did not provide a backstory to Kelly, she worked to convey her character's "flamboyance" and "desperation" through "little looks and nuances". The film and her performance received critical acclaim. William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer felt that the actress made "a wonderfully statuesque and bitchy saloon goddess", and David Edelstein of Slate magazine wrote that she has "a smoldering confidence that takes your mind off her not-always-fluid dancing although she's a perfectly fine hoofer, with majestic limbs and a commanding cleavage" and particularly praised her rendition of the song "All That Jazz". Chicago earned million|link=yes}} worldwide, and was the recipient of the Academy Award for Best Picture. For her performance, Zeta-Jones won the Academy Award, SAG Award, and the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress, among other awards and nominations. Following the success of Chicago, Zeta-Jones voiced the part of Princess Marina in Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003), an animated film featuring Brad Pitt as the voice of Sinbad the Sailor. She was drawn to the project to give her young children an opportunity to "hear her and get a sense of her on film", although the film proved to be a box office bomb. Later in 2003 Zeta-Jones starred alongside George Clooney in the Coen Brothers black comedy Intolerable Cruelty. The film, which was a commercial success, saw her play the role of a serial divorcée who is drawn towards a divorce attorney (Clooney). Writing for Empire magazine, Damon Wise called the film a "dazzling screwball comedy" and felt that Zeta-Jones showed an "an admirable facility for old-school quickfire patter". Other reviewers praised her onscreen chemistry with Clooney. award ceremony in 2005]] In 2004 Spielberg approached her to play an insecure air hostess in his comedy The Terminal, a film about a man (Tom Hanks) who is trapped at the JFK International Airport when he is denied entry into the United States. Spielberg wanted her to play the role as a strong-willed woman, with a vulnerability in her character, but A. O. Scott felt that it came across as using her for "her looks rather than for the arch, self-mocking wit that is her secret weapon as a comic actress". Commercially The Terminal performed well. She next worked with Soderbergh to film Ocean's Twelve, a sequel to the heist film Ocean's Eleven (2001), which also reunited her with stars Clooney, Pitt, and Roberts. The production, which was filmed in several countries across Europe, saw Zeta-Jones play Isabel Lahiri, a Europol agent, and the love-interest of Pitt's character. Paul Clinton of CNN notes that she "dominates the screen every time she takes a breath". Ken Tucker of New York magazine argued that her character was redundant to the film's plot. Despite dividing critics, the sequel earned over US$360 million globally. 2005–2010: Decrease in workload and return to the stage The Legend of Zorro (2005), a sequel The Mask of Zorro, saw Zeta-Jones reprise her role of Eléna opposite Banderas. Set ten years after the first film, the sequel follows Eléna struggling with married life. Unlike the original the film was disliked by critics and was a commercial disappointment. She did not have any film releases in 2006. A biopic of Harry Houdini, entitled Death Defying Acts (2007), starring Guy Pearce as the escapologist Houdini, featured Zeta-Jones as a Scottish con-artist. The production was only given a limited theatrical release. In 2007 Zeta-Jones starred alongside Aaron Eckhart and Abigail Breslin in the romantic comedy No Reservations, a remake of the German film Mostly Martha (2001). No Reservations tells the story of an ambitious chef (Zeta-Jones) whose life changes for the better when she takes in her young niece (Breslin) after her sister's death. In preparation for her part, she worked in the kitchen and waited on tables at the Fiamma Osteria restaurant in New York. Claudia Puig of USA Today thought that Zeta-Jones "shines as a character that finely balances off-putting reserve with sympathetic appeal", and Ebert, despite disliking the film, found her to be "convincing" in her role. With a global gross of US$92 million, the film marked Zeta-Jones' final commercial success of the decade. Following No Reservations Zeta-Jones significantly decreased her workload in the next five years. She focussed on her family and health, having been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder, and her infrequent acting appearances were in smaller-scale productions. She took on the role of a 40-year-old mother attracted to a younger man (Justin Bartha) in the romantic comedy The Rebound. The production was released theatrically in markets outside of the United States from 2009–10, but due to financial troubles of its distributor, The Film Development, the film failed to release theatrically in America. ceremony in 2010, where she won Outstanding Actress in a Musical for her role in A Little Night Music]] Zeta-Jones returned to the stage in 2009 with a revival of the musical A Little Night Music, which marked her Broadway debut. Set in Sweden during the early twentieth century, the musical follows the relationship between three people (Zeta-Jones, Angela Lansbury and Alexander Hanson) during the course of an evening. She played Desirée Armfeldt, an ageing actress, and was particularly drawn to the complexities of the play, saying, "There's no jazzy hands, no high kicks, no fishnet stockings, ... It's not one of those shows where you can dig about three inches and come out the other end. You can keep digging and digging and digging". She did not listen to past recordings of the songs in the play so she could bring her own interpretation to them. Claire Prentice of The Daily Telegraph wrote that Zeta-Jones brought in a "quiet, reflective poignancy" in her rendition of the song "Send in the Clowns", but Emma Brocks of The Guardian remarked that "with her pretty voice, head wresting this way and that, she seems to be auditioning for stage school". For her performance, Zeta-Jones won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical and the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. 2012–present: Return to film Following a three-year sabbatical from acting, Zeta-Jones made her screen comeback in Lay the Favorite (2012), a comedy co-starring Bruce Willis and Rebecca Hall, in which she played the jealous wife of a gambler (Willis). Reviews for the film were negative, and Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times found Zeta-Jones to be "far too shrill to amuse". In the ensemble musical comedy Rock of Ages, co-starring Tom Cruise and Bryan Cranston, Zeta-Jones played the part of a religiously conservative wife of a mayor. She was attracted to the idea of playing a "nightmare of a woman" and based the role on the politician Michele Bachmann; the film received mixed reviews and failed commercially. Her final release of 2012 was Playing for Keeps, a romantic comedy with Gerard Butler, which proved to be her third box office failure of the year. In 2013 Zeta-Jones took on a leading role in the crime thriller Broken City, co-starring Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe. The film tells the story of a private detective (Wahlberg) who is hired by the mayor of New York (Crowe) to spy on his wife (Zeta-Jones). Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter thought that Zeta-Jones "looks like class itself and nicely underplays", and Liam Lacey of The Globe and Mail observed that the actress "does a fair, if incongruous, impersonation of a forties vamp". As with Zeta-Jones' previous few projects, the film was not widely seen, and received poor reviews. This changed when Zeta-Jones collaborated with Soderbergh for the third time to film the critically acclaimed thriller Side Effects (2013). Co-starring with Channing Tatum, Jude Law and Rooney Mara, the film saw her play a mysterious psychiatrist who recommends an antidepressant drug with serious side effects. Peter Travers found the film to be a "hell of a thriller, twisty, terrific and packed with surprises" and considered Zeta-Jones to be "dynamite" in it. In the action-comedy film Red 2 (2013), a sequel to the 2010 film Red, Zeta-Jones played a seductive Russian double agent, alongside Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, and Mary-Louise Parker. She was drawn to the project, which follows the comic adventures of retired spies, for "the action, the humour, and the tongue-in-cheek quality of it". Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Justin Lowe remarked that Zeta-Jones "nicely pulls off Russian spy Katja's mix of allure and menace", and with a worldwide gross of US$148 million, the film emerged as her biggest box office success since No Reservations. Following Red 2 Zeta-Jones took another sabbatical from acting. In 2016 she played opposite Bill Nighy and Toby Jones in the British war comedy film Dad's Army, based on the television sitcom of the same name. She was cast as a glamorous journalist reporting on a British Home Guard platoon based in Walmington-on-Sea. Catherine Bray of Variety found the film to be an "amiable but creaky resurrection" of the popular sitcom, and thought that while Zeta-Jones "hits the required single note with some spirit" she was "generally underused" in it. As at August 2016, Zeta-Jones is scheduled to portray the Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco in the biopic The Godmother. She has also committed to play the actress Olivia de Havilland in Feud, an anthology television series from Ryan Murphy about the rivalry between the actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis (played by Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon, respectively). Other work As well as pursuing her acting career, Zeta-Jones supports various charities and causes. She is a patron of Swansea's Longfields Day Centre for the disabled, and has made sizeable donations to the centre. In 2001 she auctioned an outfit she wore in The Mask of Zorro (1998) to raise funds for AIDS patients in Africa. In 2005 she became the ambassador of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children charity, and launched the Full Stop appeal in Wales to raise awareness on child abuse. She has also given her support to other charitable organisations for children such as the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children and the Noah's Ark Appeal, among others. Zeta-Jones is also the founding host for A Fine Romance, an annual charitable programme that helps raise funds for the Motion Picture & Television Fund, and is one of the members of the Cinema for Peace Foundation. Zeta-Jones briefly dabbled with a singing career in the early 1990s. In 1992 she provided her voice to the character of Jean Simmons in Jeff Wayne's musical retelling of Spartacus, entitled Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of Spartacus. Three years later she released her first single, "In the Arms of Love", on Wayne's Wow! Records. She later sang "True Love Ways", a duet with David Essex in 1994. Zeta-Jones has also featured as an advertising spokeswoman for several brands and products. She was named the global ambassador for the cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden, Inc. in 2002. The same year she was signed on by the phone company T-Mobile for an estimated US$10 million per year, making her the highest-paid celebrity endorser at the time. Personal life The television series The Darling Buds of May (1991 – 93) made Zeta-Jones a popular celebrity in Britain, and her personal life has since been chronicled by the media. Her relationships in the early 1990s with the television personality John Leslie, David Essex, and the pop star Mick Hucknall were widely reported by the British press. In the mid 1990s she was briefly engaged to the Scottish actor Angus Macfadyen. at the Vanity Fair party for the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival]] Zeta-Jones met the actor Michael Douglas, with whom she shares a birthday and who is 25 years her senior, at the Deauville Film Festival in France in August 1998, after being introduced by Danny DeVito. They became engaged on 31 December 1999, and were married at the Plaza Hotel in New York on 18 November 2000 after Douglas' divorce was finalised. The high-profile ceremony, which cost an estimated £1.5 million, was called the "wedding of the year" by the BBC. The couple signed a £1 million deal with OK! magazine to release pictures of the event, and the rest of the press were not permitted to enter. Despite this, a freelance photographer surreptitiously took pictures of the ceremony which were then sold to Hello! magazine. The couple successfully sued the magazine for invasion of privacy. Douglas and Zeta-Jones have two children, a son Dylan Michael (born August 2000) and a daughter Carys Zeta (born April 2003). The family lived in Bermuda until 2009, and as of 2016, live in the country in New York. In 2010 Douglas was diagnosed with tongue cancer, and Zeta-Jones found it stressful. This trigger led to Zeta-Jones suffering from depression, and despite initial apprehension, she spoke publicly about suffering from bipolar II disorder. She sought treatment by checking herself into hospital in 2011, and again in 2013. Owing to the stress of both their illnesses, the couple decided to live separately in 2013, though without taking legal action towards separation or divorce. They reconciled in 2014, with Douglas stating that they were "stronger than ever". In the media Benefit Gala in 2010]] In the early 2000s Zeta-Jones was among the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood. The journalist Sheila Johnston of The Daily Telegraph, in 2010, described Zeta-Jones as "the ultimate self-made success" who "constantly made bold decisions, and scrubbed up very nicely into a luscious star who radiates a classic ... brand of big-screen glamour". Guy Adams of The Independent considers her personality to be "self-effacing and energetic" but takes note of her "steely core" in her off-screen persona. Her versatility has been highlighted by critics. Zeta-Jones is protective of her public image, and the use of her likeness is carefully controlled. As well as taking legal action against Hello! magazine, she sued a Nevada-based topless club for including her image on their advertising. Addressing her perceived media image, Zeta-Jones remarked in a 2004 interview to USA Weekend: "The biggest misconception of me is that I'm some die-hard, ambitious, do-anything-to-get-anything kind of person, I'm not. I'm very shy socially". In 2003, the celebrity biographer Cliff Goodwin wrote an unauthorised biography of the actress, titled Catherine Zeta-Jones: The Biography, but the publication was indefinitely postponed after her lawyers threatened legal action. Filmography and awards Selected filmography Zeta-Jones' films that have earned the most at the box office, , include: Awards and nominations For her role in Chicago (2002), Zeta-Jones was awarded the Academy Award, SAG Award, and the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has received two Golden Globe Award nominations: Best Supporting Actress for Traffic (2000) and Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical for Chicago (2002). She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2010 for her film and charity work. Notes }} References Category:Actresses